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Jay Cost

Shake it off, conservatives!

Thinking about the present day, if conservatives are right and what Walter Russell Mead has called the “blue state model” is indeed collapsing, then the GOP might not be that far away from another moment. At the least, the fact that it did not come in 2012 does not mean it is not coming.

And conservatives should be ready for it. For starters, they should ignore the triumphalists on the left espousing a permanent shift leftward. Nonsense! Yes, conservatives must do a better job of reaching out to Hispanics, but some perspective is necessary. The incumbent president is set to take in millions of fewer votes than he won in 2008. He limped across the finish line by dint of vicious demagoguery, which lowered turnout among white voters who have voted Republican in the past. Put simply, the GOP is still very much in this ballgame.

Instead, conservative should make a serious study of the leaders who made full uses of the moments when they were handed to them. On the right, these men were Bob Taft, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. On the left, they were Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama. Conservatives should ask themselves: what qualities did these leaders have in common? That will help them find the best standard bearer to guide the GOP and the conservative movement when the next moment comes.

I don’t know when that will be, but I do know that the left is wrong: The trajectory of American history is not an inevitable leftward drift. So buck up, conservatives!

Blowback

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And conservatives should be ready for it. For starters, they should ignore the triumphalists on the left espousing a permanent shift leftward. Nonsense! Yes, conservatives must do a better job of reaching out to Hispanics, but some perspective is necessary.

It isn’t just the left declaring a permanent shift leftward. Note Boehner’s post-election behavior. It’s clear that even after being handed a shattering defeat, the party establishment still has no clue.

Let’s help accelerate the collapse of the Blue states by making Red states hostile to illegal immigrants and the moochers class.

Let’s demand that our state legislatures pass laws making it very difficult to qualify for taxpayer funded ‘benefits’ for citizens and not available at all for illegals. Let’s drive the moochers to the Blue states and hasten their collapse. Make them pay for their ‘compassion’

It is not the Democrats we have to worry about. The fact is that the Republican party is now diametrically opposed to conservatives. They work to get rid of any conservative the comes along. Sarah Palin, Allen West, Newt Gingrich. Thus we will no longer have a horse in the race. it will from now forward be a choice between Marxist vs “my views are progressive”.

How about instead of sending $$$ to Karl Rove and other Super PACs, we send the money to new grassroots organizations that find our voters and turn them out to the polls? There might be something to this whole community organizing thing.

Let’s help accelerate the collapse of the Blue states by making Red states hostile to illegal immigrants and the moochers class.

Let’s demand that our state legislatures pass laws making it very difficult to qualify for taxpayer funded ‘benefits’ for citizens and not available at all for illegals. Let’s drive the moochers to the Blue states and hasten their collapse. Make them pay for their ‘compassion’

Charlemagne on November 9, 2012 at 8:42 PM

Seconded. I know Kansas was doing some things moving in that direction. I hope they go extreme with it.

You might be interested in federalism as a solution to Boehner, Rove, and the entire pathetic, national GOP. Click my name to read my blog on federalism and how reestablishing it can help us defeat the Left.

This is blitheringly idiotic drivel along the same lines as Art Laffer’s “I’m so glad Obama won, cause 2016!” insanity. Laffer is an economist. He should know better. Quantitative easing can’t continue indefinitely, and it will most likely be the death of the American economy writ-large. The dollar collapses, and we return to being a loose confederation of microeconomic mini-nation-states, lorded over by a corrupt distant government that is only interested in what it can extract from us.

Congratu-freakin-lations, Warner. I do believe you’re the first person I’ve seen here that’s called it out in such stark terms since the election. You interested in guesting on my podcast in the near future?

Pundits and bloggers have a vested interest in showing a close election. They are paid by how many viewers and readers they have.

Pollsters and statisticians on the other hand have a vested interest in being accurate. They are commissioned and paid based on their historic performance.

Jay Cost is back to writing articles, so is Dean Chambers (after reaping good bit of ad revenue from unskewedpolls.com). Even Dick Morris is all over the talk shows. Same featured bloggers are back on Hotair frontpage. There’s a reason for that, they did what they were expected to do: bend the truth to keep you around. As long as they do that, regardless of which direction the elections go they get to keep their job.

On the other side, Nate’s book just rocketed up to the second bestselling book on Amazon. PPP can expect a good number of new customers. Had they called it wrong, none of this would have happened.

lester on November 9, 2012 at 11:37 AM

Hate quoting myself, but since Jay Cost is sharing his prophecies again, it seemed appropriate.

Here’s another prophecy:

And so it goes with Pennsylvania, a state that has slowly been shifting toward the Republicans for the last twenty years. Or, at least part of the state has been shifting red.

They cannot lend or handle payroll for any company in the business because that would be a violation of federal drug money-laundering laws.

Some banks could argue that means they cannot even be a conduit for all the tax money promised from legalization because, from a federal perspective (and, for national banks, the federal perspective is all that matters), marijuana is still illegal. If they do business with marijuana shops, banks in these states could face civil or even criminal penalties.

When I started making election predictions eight years ago, I had a very different perspective than I do today. I knew relatively little about the history of presidential elections or the geography of American politics. I had a good background in political science and statistics. So, unsurprisingly in retrospect, I focused on drawing confidence intervals from poll averages.

Since then, I have learned substantially more history, soured somewhat on political science as an academic discipline, and have become much more skeptical of public opinion polls. Both political science and the political polls too often imply a scientific precision that I no longer think actually exists in American politics. I have slowly learned that politics is a lot more art than science than I once believed.

Accordingly, what follows is a prediction based on my interpretation of the lay of the land. I know others see it differently–and they could very well be right, and I could be wrong.

except our system is gradually becoming more progressive every year. And it all started with the imposition of a federal income tax. In less than a hundred year we are on the verge of socialized medicine. Guns are next.

One big tea party protest against Boehner demanding he step down from speaker would work wonders. He’d be gone before the protest even assembled just on news it will assemble.

Buddahpundit on November 9, 2012 at 8:42 PM

He needs to be removed as speaker.
He has been waving the white flag of surrender the whole past 4 years. He did nothing to win the House majority. He was dragged to victory kicking and screaming by the TEA party. His type don’t care about leadership. They don’t mind being in the minority. It’s good work if you can get it.

Look.. Boehner is a nice guy I am sure. He’s killing us though. The survival of our Republic is at stake and he looks like he’s half asleep. They’ve lost the passion for the fight. They’ve given up. They are admitting defeat and are ready to surrender and manage the decline of our nation. We cannot afford this kind of leadership.

At the very least… if he doesn’t feel like there’s any use.. he could still try to make the attempt to keep people’s hope alive. It is hope, perseverance and determination that gets people across the finish line to victory time and time again when everything else is against you!

Gosh.. I cannot get these two Marines that went out in the middle of the night against orders out of my mind… comparing their courage and sacrifice againts the laziness of our GOP leadership…to save as many people as they could! Against orders with only hand guns they sacrificed it all to save a few! What courage they displayed to the very end! They did all that they could with everything that they had… and it was politicians that let them down and betrayed them! And here sits our brave Republican leadership! He’s not facing an angry mob in the middle of the night. He’s got all the comforts of his office.. all he has to do is show a little backbone against a corrupt President and a corrupt media that would do nothing more than call him names and he can’t bring himself to do anything more for the sake of our nation than declare “ObamaCare is now the law of the land.”

Anyone notice how no one in the media ever talk about the Democrats shedding WHITE voters? They got 43% of the white vote in 2000 and this year it’s down to 39%. If they keep that up, Democrats are going to be the NON-WHITE party.

Why would our Congress not object to a software company, based in Europe, who’s CEO donated to Obama, be put in charge of tallying up major portions of the Presidential election vote? It is virtually impossible for a non-professional to detect software programmed to manipulate numbers, even if anyone had the backbone to suggest looking.

I could go on. This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg, ladies and gentlemen. No, the last freakin thing we need is another law. The law has failed us.

gryphon202 on November 9, 2012 at 8:58 PM

But if you look at all the things you’ve mentioned (aside from income tax (and of course I agree with you about that)), they are all things that have increased public spending and compounded the fiscal environment to the point where we are now; a coming fiscal catastrophe.

Guess who’s holding the bag for that one? Democrats!

Perhaps it’s even a good thing that Romney lost, given that Republicans would’ve taken the brunt of criticism for any type of remedy (spending cuts) and we can assume that whatever that would’ve been would not have been enough.

Democrats are going to be in an unprecedented position (at least to my knowledge) of having to explain why all their spending is so necessary that we must do whatever horrible remedy they will come up with (which will have to be awfully horrible in order to actually deal with such a vast discrepancy).

Obama is getting away with his rhetoric now because we can still borrow cheaply. That won’t last.

So, economics are on our side. The following 4 years will be filled with Republican bashing for not spending more money, then the crisis hits and it was Republicans that were looking out for us all along.

Obviously I’m guessing as to how the crisis will unfold, but it will be an issue of spending and revenue and without the ability to borrow money cheaply the Democrats are going to be in a very tough spot.

Anyone notice how no one in the media ever talk about the Democrats shedding WHITE voters? They got 43% of the white vote in 2000 and this year it’s down to 39%. If they keep that up, Democrats are going to be the NON-WHITE party.

dforston on November 9, 2012 at 9:17 PM

That’s because they’ve won the last two elections. If the Democrats has lost the last two elections because they shed white voters you would hear more about it. It will be interesting to see if the white vote can go below 39% for them. It might be the bottom.

I have no interest in the traditional straw clutching — oh, it was the weak candidate . . . hard to knock off an incumbent . . . next time we’ll have a better GOTV operation in Colorado . . . I’m always struck, if one chances to be with a GOP insider when a new poll rolls off the wire, that their first reaction is to query whether it’s of “likely” voters or merely “registered” voters. As the consultant class knows, registered voters skew more Democrat than likely voters, and polls of “all adults” skew more Democrat still. Hence the preoccupation with turnout models. In other words, if America had compulsory voting as Australia does, the Republicans would lose every time. In Oz, there’s no turnout model, because everyone turns out. The turnout-model obsession is an implicit acknowledgment of an awkward truth — that, outside the voting booth, the default setting of American society is ever more liberal and statist.

My ideas about hard work, government BEING THE ONE forced to live within its means and the freedom to go as far or as short a distance in life as one can is outmoded. The Tax Cuts that grew the treasury under Bush were evil I’m told. Guess what Jay I called MY congressman and said “let ALL the Bush tax cuts expire.”

We could have won if:
2 Senate Candidates hadn’t made the “War on Women” attack stick
Mitt Romney hadn’t been caught on video with his 47% comment
Our GOTV software had worked. Or been tested.
Our candidate had a consistent message
We attacked our opponent instead of calling him a good guy
Our internal polls had been accurate

All of this is easily correctible, but the GOP is still running the party like it did in Lincoln’s day.

They think the objective is to win elections. The objective is to preserve freedom. Any discussion not centered on that is a waste of breath.

CycloneCDB on November 9, 2012 at 10:04 PM

How do you preserve freedom without winning elections? When the President is willing to use Executive powers to change the role of government, he can take your freedom no matter how noble a losing campaign you ran.

But the truth is, we could win without getting dirty, if we worked smarter at it.